Hacking Through Cities With Creative Sustainability

While the ever-popularizing mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” has manifested in practical features such as easy-sort recycle bins on the street and bottle returns at grocery stores, how can sustainability be further incorporated into city dwellers’ increasingly busy everyday lives?

The Rotten Apple project exercises creativity agency by finding clever and simple ways to alter his surroundings to introduce new facets of function and fun into the urban environment. It features 23 urban hacks thus far that focus on making minor changes to commonplace components of cities that allow them to be utilized in more than one way. For example, simple hinge mechanism and a wooden board can be added to a bike rack to turn it into a folding seat, a power plant hides an internal outlet that can be used to charge your phone on the street, and a chessboard can be fixed to a fire hydrant to host a leisurely game of chess while not in use.

Bike rack folding seat

Pop-up library

Urban hammock

Rotten Apple summarizes its purpose in quote from Austrian designer and advocate of environmental responsibility Victor Papanek, who once stated, “design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical in the truest sense. It must dedicate itself to (…) maximum diversity with minimum inventory (…) or doing the most with the least.” The idea here is to see sustainability everywhere without taking for granted that any given object or urban attribute can serve only its intended function. By pinpointing the intersection of fun, renewability, and urbanism, Rotten Apple seeks to keep environmentalism from going stagnant in cities by encouraging creativity in conjunction with efficiency.

The Toronto office of advertising agency BBDO came up with this rather brilliant and funny intervention on behalf of Smart. The ad men strategically placed numerous tiny billboards along sidewalks, on walls and public objects in Toronto.

During our stay in Copenhagen (as you may know we got invited by Hewlett Packard) we were offered the chance to visit the spectacular 8-House by Bjarke Ingels. The man himself was at the spot to guide us around and explain the idea behind this massive, multifunctional, aluminium rock, which is located in the new…

Los Angeles-based architecture firm INABA have designed and installed a so-called ‘Pool Noodle Rooftop’ for the non-profit art group X-Initiative in Chelsea, New York City. The designers needed to find a light weight, easy to install material to create a large amount of seating for guests, so they came up with huge structures of pool…

The architects of H3T, who have been mentioned before on this blog thanks to their Bike-0-Sauna, have come up with an illegal toilet providing the best view ever to its users. The Toilet with a View provides one of the most important qualities of a good toilet: privacy. It’s located far from everyone, and nobody…